Strategic Design

Freedom to lead your organization in the direction it needs to be taken

A sizable budget to help grow and support your ideas and initiatives

Incentives for your staff and key influencers to promote your message

Providing co-branding rights for organizations that meet your guidelines to grow the power and reach of your brand

Freedom to LeadIn order to advertise on campus and request funding, you had to be recognized as an official student organization by SIUE's Student Government. Normally, Student Government will recommend that your organization be designed using a democratic leadership style. Something I noticed early on was that if my team and I were to set the foundation for the organization I envisioned before we graduated, I would need to cut out as much red-tape as possible. With that said, we managed to pass a constitution (under the radar) through Student Government that gave all decision power to the President. Keep in mind the constitution also noted that the President could not act without the approval of Athletics and was responsible for representing the wants and needs of the student body. With our constitution passed, we had gained our needed official recognition as a student organization and any student marketing needs from Athletics could now be carried out by Red Storm. This basically transformed Red Storm into a subsidiary of Athletics that had access to more funding and more influential power towards a student population, and made the President into a liaison role between Athletics and the student body.

A Sizable BudgetYou have 16 teams you now have to consider in your promotion efforts and an entire school's population of 14,000+ students to market to. Sure, we could request funds from Student Government, but it wouldn't be enough to build the brand we wanted to. Concluding that fundraising wasn't cost effective, we looked outside the box for funding and identified where all the disposable income was on campus that we could potentially tap into. Now, none of the potential income we identified could be used as a set budget, but we could at least dream big and partner with internal sources, saving us from wasted time fundraising or having to charge membership dues.

Explanation of the previous graphic:

There are a little over 250 student organizations, and each one has on avg. $300 of disposable income. - $75,000

Each individual school’s dean has about $2,000 set aside to interact with students in their programs. - $14,000

Housing employs 74 Resident Assistants which are all given $150 extra to host events for their student residents. - $11,100

Student government grants up to $7,000 for events and $300 for annual allocations to student organizations. - $7,300

University Marketing and the Alumni Foundation both have their own budgets that are open to granting money to student initiatives totaling about $3,500.

Last of all, Athletics, Red Storm’s Advising department, utilizes various sponsors for t-shirts and promotional events that add to the red storm tide totaling about $5,000

Incentives for Staff & Key InfluencersOur executive board was basically a marketing and brand ambassador team, where responsibilities for board members ranged from participating in creative ideation sessions, to canvassing SIUE and the off campus housing areas with marketing materials, to volunteering for our weekly tailgates and promotional events. The need for constant participation and involvement was fairly large, so I knew in order to keep our team motivated, I had to figure out a way to provide incentives. I used two methods to help motivate my staff and key influencers. One method was through power and rank. I provided our loyal volunteers with officer positions of their choosing and allowed them to move forward with any initiative they wanted to under the Red Storm umbrella. Another method included making sure my staff and key influencers had exclusive access to any promotional giveaway we had planned, which included free T-shirts, special game-day tickets, free food, and other promotional items. The key was creating exclusivity, which in turn provided bragging rights for anyone who was so lucky to own one of our t-shirts or participate in one of our events. If you can't provide monetary incentives, the next best thing is to establish a sense of pride in what they contribute to the organization, thus replacing money with bragging rights.

Co-Branding RightsThe last component needed to lay a rock-solid foundation for the future of Red Storm was finding a way to intertwine the brand into other organizations and departments campus-wide. For something that was needed to withstand the test of time and maintain a reputation as the symbol for SIUE pride, the brand needed to not only be accepted by SIUE as a whole, but it needed to be adopted. The idea was to make it so other departments and organizations were just as vested in our success as we were, thus making it virtually impossible to be removed. My page on Branding Red Storm explains further what promotions and marketing campaigns we created to help establish the power of the brand, but once that power was created, the final step was to make the brand accessible to anyone who wanted to build upon the foundation of pride we had established.